Countering Personalized Speech

Social media platforms use personalization algorithms to make content curation decisions for each end user. These personalized recommendation decisions are essentially speech conveying a platform\u27s predictions on content relevance for each end user. Yet, they are causing some of the worst problems on the internet. First, they facilitate the precipitous spread of mis- and disinformation by exploiting the very same biases and insecurities that drive end user engagement with such content. Second, they exacerbate social media addiction and related mental health harms by leveraging users\u27 affective needs to drive engagement to greater and greater heights. Lastly, they erode end user privacy and autonomy as both sources and incentives for data collection. As with any harmful speech, the solution is often counterspeech. Free speech jurisprudence considers counterspeech the most speech-protective weapon to combat false or harmful speech. Thus, to combat problematic recommendation decisions, social media platforms, policymakers, and other stakeholders should embolden end users to use counterspeech to reduce the harmful effects of platform personalization. One way to implement this solution is through end user personalization inputs. These inputs reflect end user expression about a platform\u27s recommendation decisions. However, industry-standard personalization inputs are failing to provide effective countermeasures against problematic recommendation decisions. On most, if not all, major social media platforms, the existing inputs confer limited ex post control over the platform\u27s recommendation decisions. In order for end user personalization to achieve the promise of counterspeech, I make several proposals along key regulatory modalities, including revising the architecture of personalization inputs to confer robust ex ante capabilities that filter by content type and characteristics

PERSONALIZED POINT OF INTEREST RECOMMENDATIONS WITH PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNIQUES

Location-based services (LBS) have become increasingly popular, with millions of people using mobile devices to access information about nearby points of interest (POIs). Personalized POI recommender systems have been developed to assist users in discovering and navigating these POIs. However, these systems typically require large amounts of user data, including location history and preferences, to provide personalized recommendations. The collection and use of such data can pose significant privacy concerns. This dissertation proposes a privacy-preserving approach to POI recommendations that address these privacy concerns. The proposed approach uses clustering, tabular generative adversarial networks, and differential privacy to generate synthetic user data, allowing for personalized recommendations without revealing individual user data. Specifically, the approach clusters users based on their fuzzy locations, generates synthetic user data using a tabular generative adversarial network and perturbs user data with differential privacy before it is used for recommendation. The proposed approaches achieve well-balanced trade-offs between accuracy and privacy preservation and can be applied to different recommender systems. The approach is evaluated through extensive experiments on real-world POI datasets, demonstrating that it is effective in providing personalized recommendations while preserving user privacy. The results show that the proposed approach achieves comparable accuracy to traditional POI recommender systems that do not consider privacy while providing significant privacy guarantees for users. The research\u27s contribution is twofold: it compares different methods for synthesizing user data specifically for POI recommender systems and offers a general privacy-preserving framework for different recommender systems. The proposed approach provides a novel solution to the privacy concerns of POI recommender systems, contributes to the development of more trustworthy and user-friendly LBS applications, and can enhance the trust of users in these systems

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Fairness in Recommendation: Foundations, Methods and Applications

As one of the most pervasive applications of machine learning, recommender systems are playing an important role on assisting human decision making. The satisfaction of users and the interests of platforms are closely related to the quality of the generated recommendation results. However, as a highly data-driven system, recommender system could be affected by data or algorithmic bias and thus generate unfair results, which could weaken the reliance of the systems. As a result, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems in recommendation settings. Recently, there has been growing attention on fairness considerations in recommender systems with more and more literature on approaches to promote fairness in recommendation. However, the studies are rather fragmented and lack a systematic organization, thus making it difficult to penetrate for new researchers to the domain. This motivates us to provide a systematic survey of existing works on fairness in recommendation. This survey focuses on the foundations for fairness in recommendation literature. It first presents a brief introduction about fairness in basic machine learning tasks such as classification and ranking in order to provide a general overview of fairness research, as well as introduce the more complex situations and challenges that need to be considered when studying fairness in recommender systems. After that, the survey will introduce fairness in recommendation with a focus on the taxonomies of current fairness definitions, the typical techniques for improving fairness, as well as the datasets for fairness studies in recommendation. The survey also talks about the challenges and opportunities in fairness research with the hope of promoting the fair recommendation research area and beyond.Comment: Accepted by ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST

Privacy-preserving social media data publishing for personalized ranking-based recommendation

Personalized recommendation is crucial to help users find pertinent information. It often relies on a large collection of user data, in particular users' online activity (e.g., tagging/rating/checking-in) on social media, to mine user preference. However, releasing such user activity data makes users vulnerable to inference attacks, as private data (e.g., gender) can often be inferred from the users' activity data. In this paper, we proposed PrivRank, a customizable and continuous privacy-preserving social media data publishing framework protecting users against inference attacks while enabling personalized ranking-based recommendations. Its key idea is to continuously obfuscate user activity data such that the privacy leakage of user- specified private data is minimized under a given data distortion budget, which bounds the ranking loss incurred from the data obfuscation process in order to preserve the utility of the data for enabling recommendations. An empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets shows that our framework can efficiently provide effective and continuous protection of user-specified private data, while still preserving the utility of the obfuscated data for personalized ranking-based recommendation. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, PrivRank achieves both a better privacy protection and a higher utility in all the ranking-based recommendation use cases we tested